Delft University of Technology

Delft Center for Systems and Control

Technical report 09-001

Fuzzy ant colony optimization for

optimal control∗

J. van Ast, R. Babuška, and B. De Schutter

If you want to cite this report, please use the following reference instead:
J. van Ast, R. Babuška, and B. De Schutter, “Fuzzy ant colony optimization
for optimal control,” Proceedings of the 2009 American Control Conference,
St. Louis, Missouri, pp. 1003–1008, June 2009.

Delft Center for Systems and Control

Delft University of Technology
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The Netherlands
phone: +31-15-278.51.19 (secretary)
fax: +31-15-278.66.79
URL: http://www.dcsc.tudelft.nl
∗
This report can also be downloaded via http://pub.deschutter.info/abs/09_001.html
 Fuzzy Ant Colony Optimization for Optimal Control
Jelmer van Ast, Robert Babuška, and Bart De Schutter
Abstract— Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) has proven to be
a very powerful optimization heuristic for Combinatorial Opti-
mization Problems. While being very successful for various NP-
complete optimization problems, ACO is not trivially applicable
to control problems. In this paper a novel ACO algorithm is
introduced for the automated design of optimal control policies
for continuous-state dynamic systems. The so called Fuzzy ACO
algorithm integrates the multi-agent optimization heuristic of
ACO with a fuzzy partitioning of the state space of the system.
A simulated control problem is presented to demonstrate the
functioning of the proposed algorithm.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is inspired by ants and
their behavior of finding shortest paths from their nest to
sources of food. Without any leader that could guide the ants
to optimal trajectories, the ants manage to find these optimal
trajectories over time in a distributed fashion. In an ACO
algorithm, the metaphorical ants are agents programmed to
find an optimal combination of elements of a given set that
maximizes some utility function. The key ingredient in ACO
and its biological counterpart are the pheromones. With real
ants, these are chemicals deposited by the ants and their
concentration encodes a map of trajectories, where stronger
concentrations represent better trajectories. ACO represents
the class of metaheuristic optimization methods that use the
concepts of distributed optimization and pheromone maps in
solving Combinatorial Optimization Problems [1].
This paper introduces an ACO-based algorithm for the
automated design of optimal control policies for continuous-
state dynamic systems. The algorithm combines the concepts
of multi-agent optimization and fuzzy approximation of the
state space in a novel approach.
This paper is structured as follows. Section II describes
the relation of the subjects covered in this paper to the
state of the art. In Section III, the ACO heuristic is briefly
reviewed. Section IV presents some preliminaries on the
control problem and the fuzzy partitioning of the state space.
In Section V the Fuzzy ACO algorithm is introduced and
described in detail. Section VI demonstrates the functioning
of the Fuzzy ACO algorithm on a simple control problem
and Section VII concludes this paper.
This research is financially supported by Senter, Ministry of Economic
Affairs of The Netherlands within the BSIK-ICIS project “Self-Organizing
Moving Agents” (grant no. BSIK03024)
Jelmer van Ast, Robert Babuška, and Bart De Schutter are with
the Delft Center for Systems and Control of the Delft University of
Technology, Mekelweg 2, 2628 CD Delft, The Netherlands (email:
j.m.vanast@tudelft.nl, r.babuska@tudelft.nl,
b@deschutter.info). Bart De Schutter is also with the Marine and
Transport Technology Department of the Delft University of Technology.
II. R ELATION TO THE S TATE OF THE A RT
The state of the art related to the subjects covered in this
paper can be summarized as follows.
1) The original ACO algorithm in the form of the Ant
System has been introduced in [2] with the Ant Colony
System in [3] and the M A X -M I N Ant System in [4].
The basic ACO algorithm and its variants have successfully
been applied to various optimization problems [5], [6],
[7], [8]. A detailed description of ACO algorithms and its
applications can be found in the survey [1] and the book [5].
2) One of the first real application of the ACO framework
to optimization problems in continuous search spaces is
described in [9] and [10]. Earlier application of the ant
metaphor to continuous optimization appears in [11], with
more recent work like the Aggregation Pheromones System
in [12] and the Differential Ant-Stigmergy Algorithm in [13].
3) The first application of ACO to the automated design
of optimal control policies for continuous-state dynamic
systems has been developed by the authors of this paper
in [14]. The method however is hampered by the large
number of bins needed to quantize the state space in order
to capture the dynamics of the original system. This curse
of dimensionality is a phenomenon widely encountered when
an originally continuous-state system needs to be represented
using a finite number of quantized states.
4) There are only a few publications that combine ACO
with the concept of fuzzy control [15], [16], [17]. In all
three publications fuzzy controllers are obtained using ACO,
rather than presenting an actual fuzzy ACO algorithm, as
introduced in this paper.
This paper contributes to the above four categories of the
state of the art. It contributes to 1) by further exploring
the applicability of ACO and to 2) by presenting a novel
approach to the optimization in continuous spaces using
ACO. It presents an extension to the work mentioned in 3)
by curbing the curse of dimensionality through the use of
a parametric interpolation to retain a continuous state space
with a finite number of parameters, typically much smaller
than the number of quantized states that would be necessary
to achieve similar accuracy. The interpolation method of
choice is fuzzy approximation. Finally, the work in this paper
is different from that described in 4) as it presents an ACO
algorithm that operates on the membership degrees of the
ants to find the optimal pheromone map corresponding to the
fuzzy partitioning of the state space, rather than optimizing
the membership functions themselves, or the linguistic rules.
 III. A NT C OLONY O PTIMIZATION
A. Framework for ACO Algorithms
ACO algorithms have been developed to solve hard com-
binatorial optimization problems [1]. A combinatorial opti-
mization problem can be represented as a tuple P = hS , Fi,
where S is the solution space with s ∈ S a specific candi-
date solution and F : S → R+ is a fitness function assigning
strictly positive values to candidate solutions, where higher
values correspond to better solutions. The purpose of the
algorithm is to find a solution s∗ , or set of solutions S ∗ ,
s∗ ∈ S ∗ ⊆ S that maximizes the fitness function. The
solution s∗ is then called an optimal solution and S ∗ is
called the set of optimal solutions.
In ACO, the combinatorial optimization problem is repre-
sented as a graph consisting of a set of vertices and a set of
arcs connecting the vertices. A particular solution s consists
of solution components, which are denoted by ci j and which
are pairs of a vertex and an arc. Here the subscript i j denotes
that this solution component consists of a vertex i and an
arc that connects this vertex to another vertex j. A particular
solution s is thus a concatenation of solution components,
and forms a tour from the initial vertex to the terminal
vertex. How the terminal vertices are defined depends on the
problem considered. For instance, in the traveling salesman
problem1 , there are multiple terminal vertices, namely for
each ant the terminal vertex is equal to its initial vertex,
after visiting all other cities (i.e. vertices) exactly once. For
the application to control problems, as considered in this
paper, the terminal vertex corresponds to the desired steady-
state. Two values are associated with the arcs: a pheromone
trail variable τi j and a heuristic variable ηi j . The pheromone
trail represents the acquired knowledge about the optimal
solution over time and the heuristic variable provides a priori
information about the quality of the solution component, i.e.,
the quality of moving to a node j from a node i. In the case
of the traveling salesman problem, the heuristic variables
typically represent the distance between the respective pair
of cities. In general, the heuristic variables represent a short-
term quality measure of the solution component, while the
task is to acquire a concatenation of solution components that
overall form the optimal solution. The pheromone variables
basically encode the measure of the long-term quality of
adding the solution component. The trade-off between these
two parameters is important for the performance of ACO.
B. The Ant System and Ant Colony System
The basic ACO algorithm works as follows. A set of M
ants is randomly distributed over the vertices. The heuristic
variables are set to encode the prior knowledge by favoring
the choice of some vertices over others. For each ant c,
the partial solution sp,c is initially empty and all pheromone
variables are set to some initial value τ0 . In each iteration,
1 In the traveling salesman problem, there is a set of cities connected by
roads of different lengths and the problem is to find the sequence of cities
that takes the traveling salesman to all cities, visiting each city exactly once
and bringing him back to its initial city with a minimum length of the tour.
each ant decides based on some probability distribution,
which solution component ci j to add to its partial solution
sp,c . The probability pc { j|i} for an ant c on a vertex i to
move to a vertex j within its feasible neighborhood Ni is:
β
τiαj ηi j
pc { j|i} = β
, ∀ j ∈ Ni , (1)
∑l∈Ni τilα ηil
with α and β determining the relative importance of ηi j
and τi j respectively. The neighborhood Ni is the set of
not yet visited vertices that are connected to the vertex i.
By moving from vertex i to vertex j, each ant adds the
associated solution component ci j to its partial solution sp
until it reaches its terminal vertex and completes its candidate
solution. This candidate solution is evaluated using the fitness
function F(s) and the resulting value is used to update the
pheromone levels by:
τi j ← (1 − ρ )τi j + ρ ∑ ∆τi j (s), (2)
s∈Supd
with ρ ∈ (0, 1) the evaporation rate and Supd the set of
solutions that are eligible to be used for the pheromone
update, which will be explained further on in this section.
The pheromone deposit ∆τi j (s) is computed as:

F(s) , if ci j ∈ s
∆τi j (s) =
0 , otherwise
The pheromone levels are a measure of how desirable it
is to add the associated solution component to the partial
solution. In order to incorporate forgetting, the pheromone
levels decrease by some factor in each iteration. In this way
it can be avoided that the algorithm prematurely converges to
suboptimal solutions. In the next iteration, each ant repeats
the previous steps, but now the pheromone levels have been
updated and can be used to make better decisions about
which vertex to move to. After some stopping criterion has
been reached, the pheromone levels encode the solution of
the optimization problem.
There exist various rules to construct Supd , of which the
most standard one is to use all the candidate solutions found
in the trial Strial 2 . This update rule is typical for the first ACO
algorithm, called the Ant System (AS) [2]. Other update rules
have shown to outperform the AS update rule. Most notably,
the two most successful ACO variants in practice, the Ant
Colony System (ACS) [3] and the M A X -M I N Ant
System [4] respectively use the Global Best and the Iteration
Best update rule. These methods result in a strong bias of the
pheromone trail reinforcement towards solutions that have
been proven to perform well and additionally reduce the
computational complexity of the algorithm. An important
2 In ACO literature, the term trial is seldom used. It is rather a term from
the reinforcement learning (RL) community [18]. In our opinion it is also a
more appropriate term for ACO and we will use it to denote the part of the
algorithm from the initialization of the ants over the state space until the
global pheromone update step. The corresponding term for a trial in ACO
is iteration and the set of all candidate solutions found in each iteration is
denoted as Siter . In this paper, equivalently to RL, we prefer to use the
word iteration to indicate one interaction step with the system.
element from the ACS algorithm is the local pheromone
update rule, which occurs while iterating through the trial
and is defined as follows:
τi j ← (1 − γ )τi j + γτ0 , (3)
where γ ∈ (0, 1) is a parameter similar to ρ , i j is the index
of the solution component just added, and τ0 is the initial
value of the pheromone trail. The effect of (3) is that during
the trial visited solution components are made less attractive
for other ants to take, in that way promoting the exploration
of other, less frequently visited, solution components. In this
paper, the introduced Fuzzy ACO algorithm is based on the
AS combined with the local pheromone update rule of ACS.
IV. C ONTROL P ROBLEM AND F UZZY A PPROXIMATION
A. The Optimal Control Problem
Assume we have a nonlinear system,
T characterized by a
state vector x = x1 x2 . . . xn . Also assume that the
state can be controlled by an input u and can be measured
at discrete time steps, with a sample time Ts , and that the
system dynamics in discrete-time can be denoted as:
x(k + 1) = f (x(k), u(k)),
with k the discrete time index. The optimal control problem
is to control the state of the system from any given initial
state x(0) = x0 to a desired goal state x(K) = xg in an optimal
way, where optimality is defined by minimizing the following
quadratic cost function:
K−1
J= ∑ eT (k + 1)Qe(k + 1) + uT (k)Ru(k), (4)
k=0
with e(k +1) = x(k +1)−xg the error at time k +1 and Q and
R positive definite matrices of appropriate dimensions. The
problem is to find a nonlinear mapping from states to input
u(k) = g(x(k)) that, when applied to the system in x0 results
in a sequence of state-action pairs (u(0), x(1)), (u(1), x(2)),
. . ., (u(K − 1), xg ) that minimizes this cost function. The
quadratic cost function in (4) is minimized if the goal is
reached in minimum time given the dynamics of the system
and restrictions on the size of the input. The matrices Q and
R balance the importance of speed versus the aggressiveness
of the controller.
In the case of an ACO implementation, only a finite set
of input values, called the action set U , can be used. The
goal is then actually to find the nonlinear mapping of states
to the action set that minimizes (4).
B. Quantization Issues
For a system with a continuous-valued state space, op-
timization algorithms like ACO can only be applied if the
state space is quantized. The most straightforward way to
do this is to divide the state space into a finite number of
bins, such that each state value is assigned to exactly one
bin. These bins can be enumerated and used as the vertices
in the ACO graph. It is easy to see that the state transitions
are stochastic. Namely, each bin corresponds to a range of
states and an input to the system may drive its state to one
bin, or another. In [14], a variation to the AS algorithm
is introduced that is capable of solving an optimal control
problem in this manner. However, the number of bins needed
to accurately capture the dynamics of the original system
may become very large even for simple systems with only
two state variables. Moreover, the time complexity of the
ACO algorithm grows exponentially with the number of bins,
making the algorithm infeasible for realistic systems.
A much better alternative is not to quantize the state space
at all, but to approximate it by a smooth parameterized
function approximator. In that case, there is still a finite
number of parameters, but this number is typically much
smaller compared to using crisp quantization. The universal
function approximator that is used in this paper is the fuzzy
approximator.
C. Fuzzy Approximation
With fuzzy approximation, the domain of each state vari-
able is partitioned using membership functions. We define the
membership functions for the state variables to be triangular-
shaped, such that the membership degrees for any value of
the state on the domain always sum up to one. Only the
centers of the membership functions have to be stored. Let
Ai denote the membership functions for x1 , with ai their
centers for i = 1, . . . , NA , with NA the number of membership
functions for x1 . Similarly for x2 , denote the membership
functions by Bi , with bi their centers for i = 1, . . . , NB , with
NB the number of membership functions for x2 . Similarly,
the membership functions can be defined for the other state
variables in x, but for the sake of notation, the discussion
in this paper limits the number to two, without loss of
generality. Note that in the example in Section VI, the order
of the system is four.
The membership degree of Ai and Bi are respectively
denoted by µAi (x1 (k)) and µBi (x2 (k)) for a specific value
of the state at time k. The degree of fulfillment is computed
by multiplying the two membership degrees:
βi j (x(k)) = µAi (x1 (k)) · µB j (x2 (k)).
Let the vector of all degrees of fulfillment for a certain
state at time k be denoted by:
β (x(k)) =[β11 (x(k)) β12 (x(k)) . . . β1NB (x(k))
β21 (x(k)) β22 (x(k)) . . . β2NB (x(k))
... βNA NB (x(k))]T , (5)
which is a vector containing βi j for all combinations of i j.
Each element will be associated to a vertex in the graph
used by the Fuzzy ACO algorithm introduced in this paper.
Most of the steps taken from the AS and ACS algorithms
for dealing with the β (x(k)) vectors from (5) need to be
reconsidered. This is the subject of the following section.
V. F UZZY ACO FOR O PTIMAL C ONTROL
A. Outline of the Algorithm
In the original paper on ACO for optimal control [14],
the continuous state variables were quantized into a finite
number of bins, called the quantized states. All combi-
nations of these quantized states for the different state
variables corresponded to the nodes in the graph and the
arcs corresponded to transitions from one quantized state to
another. Because of the quantization, the resulted system was
transformed into a stochastic decision problem. However,
the pheromones were associated to these arcs as usual. In
the fuzzy case, the state space is partitioned by membership
functions, as described in Section IV-C and the combination
of the indices to these membership functions for the different
state variables correspond to the nodes in the construction
graph. With the fuzzy interpolation, the system remains a
deterministic decision problem, but the transition from node
to node now does not directly correspond to a state transition.
The pheromones are associated to the arcs as usual, but the
updating needs to take into account the degree of fulfillment
of the associated membership functions. This updating will
be described in Sections V-E and V-F.
In [14], the vertex to vertex transitions of an ant are not
deterministic. In Fuzzy ACO, an ant is not assigned to a
certain vertex at a certain time, but to all vertices according
to some degree of fulfillment at the same time and a transition
from vertex to vertex is not trivial either. Because of this, a
solution component ci j does not contain pairs of vertex-next
vertex, but of state-action. For this reason, a pheromone τi j
is now denoted as τiu with i the index of the vertex (i.e. the
corresponding element of β ) and u the action. For the sake
of notation, no distinction will be made between the actual
input u(k) and the index of the input (the action) u.
Similar to the definition of the vector of all degrees of
fulfillment in (5), the vector of all pheromones for a certain
action u at time k is denoted as:
T
τ u (k) = τ1u (k) τ2u (k) . . . τNA NB u (k) .

B. Outline of a Trial
In the following sections, the fuzzy action selection and
the local and global pheromone update are explained in
more detail. Two more elements in this algorithm need
special attention, namely the initialization of the ants and
the determination whether an ant has reached the goal.
When using a Global Best pheromone update rule in an
optimal control problem, all ants have to be initialized to
the same state, as starting from states that require less time
and less effort to reach the goal would always result in a
better Global Best solution. Ultimately, initializing an ant
exactly in the goal state would be the best possible solution
and no other solution, starting from more interesting states
would get the opportunity to update the pheromones in the
global pheromone update phase. In order to find a control
policy from any initial state to the goal state, the Global
Best update rule cannot be used. Simply using all solutions
of all ants in the updating, like in the original AS algorithm,
the resulting algorithm does allow for random initialization
of the ants over the state space and is therefore used in the
Fuzzy ACO algorithm.
Regarding the terminal condition for the ants, with the
fuzzy implementation, none of the vertices can be pointed
out as being the terminal vertex. Rather there has to be
defined a set of membership functions that can be used to
determine to what degree the goal state has been reached.
These membership functions can be used to express the
linguistic fuzzy term of the state being close to the goal.
If this has been satisfied, the ant has terminated its trial.
C. Parameter Setting
Some of the parameters are similarly initialized as with the
ACS. The global and local pheromone trail decay factors are
set to a preferably small value, respectively ρ ∈ (0, 1) and
γ ∈ (0, 1). There will be no heuristic parameter associated to
the arcs in the construction graph, so only an exponential
weighting factor for the pheromone trail α > 0 needs to
be chosen. Increasing α leads to more biased decisions to-
wards the one corresponding to the highest pheromone level.
Choosing α = 2 or 3 appears to be an appropriate choice.
Furthermore, some control parameters for the algorithm need
to be chosen, such as the maximum number of iterations per
trial, Kmax , and the maximum number of trials, Tmax . The
latter one can be set to, e.g., 100 trials, where the former one
depends on the sample time Ts and a guess of the time needed
to get from the initial state to the goal optimally, Tguess . A
good choice for Kmax would be to take about 10 times the
expected number of iterations Tguess · Ts−1 . Specific to the
fuzzy implementation, the number of membership functions
and the spacing over the state domain need to be determined.
Furthermore, the pheromones are initialized as τiu = τ0 for
all i, u, where τ0 is a small, positive value, which, according
to [3] can be chosen as τ0 = (n · Lguess )−1 , with n the number
of nodes and Lguess a guess of the optimal tour length. Finally
the number of ants M must be chosen large enough such that
the complete state space can be visited frequently enough.
D. Fuzzy Action Selection
The action is chosen randomly according to the probability
distribution:
τ αu (k)
pc {u|β c (k)}(k) = β Tc (k) · , (6)
∑l∈U τ αl (k)
where all operations are performed element-wise, except for
the inner product (·). Note that when β c contains exactly
one 1 and for the rest only zeros, this would correspond to
the crisp case, where the state is quantized to a set of bins
and (6) then reduces to the original case in (1).
E. Local Pheromone Update
The standard local pheromone update from the ACS
algorithm from (3) can be modified to the fuzzy case as
follows:
τ u ←τ u (1 − β ) + ((1 − γ )τ u + γτ0 )β
= τ u (1 − γβ ) + τ0 (γβ ), (7)
where all operations are performed element-wise.
As all ants update the pheromone levels associated with
the state just visited and the action just taken in parallel,
one may wonder whether or not the order in which the
updates are done matters, when the algorithm is executed on
a standard CPU, where all operations are done in series. If it
would matter, there would be a serious flaw in the algorithm.
With crisp quantization, the ants may indeed sometimes visit
the same state and with fuzzy quantization, the ants may
very well share some of the membership functions with a
membership degree larger than zero. We will show that in
both cases, the order of updates in series does not influence
the final value of the pheromones after the joint update. In
the original, crisp case, the local pheromone update from (3)
may be rewritten as follows:
(1)
τi j ←(1 − γ )τi j + γτ0
= (1 − γ )(τi j − τ0 ) + τ0 .
After n updates, the pheromone level is reduced to:
(n)
τi j ← (1 − γ )n (τi j − τ0 ) + τ0 , (8)
which shows that the order of the update is of no influence
to the final value of the pheromone level.
For the fuzzy case a similar derivation can be made. In
general, after all the ants have performed the update, the
pheromone vector is reduced to:
τu ← ∏ {1 − γβ c }(τ u − τ0 ) + τ0 , (9)
c∈{1,2,...,M}
where again all operations are performed element-wise. This
result also reveals that the final values of the pheromones are
invariant with respect to the order of updates. Furthermore,
also note that when β c contains exactly one 1 and for the
rest only zeros, corresponding to the crisp case, the fuzzy
local pheromone update from either (7) or (9) reduces to the
original case in respectively (3) or (8).
F. Global Pheromone Update
The global pheromone update step is similar to (2) with
the pheromone deposit defined as:
J (s)β (x) , if ci j ∈ s ∈ Strial
 −1
∆τi j =
0 , otherwise,
with J(s) the cost of the sequence of states and actions,
according to (4).
As explained in Section V-B, for optimal control problems,
the appropriate update rule is to use all solutions by all ants
in the trial Strial . In the fuzzy case, the solutions s ∈ Strial
consist of sequences of states and actions and the states can
be fuzzified so that they are represented by sequences of
vectors of degrees of fulfillment β . Instead of one pheromone
level, in the fuzzy case a set of pheromone levels are updated
to a certain degree. It can be easily seen that as this update
process is just a series of pheromone deposits, the final value
of the pheromone levels relates to the sum of these deposits
and is invariant with respect to the order of these deposits.
This is also the case for this step in the AS or ACS algorithm.
VI. E XAMPLE : NAVIGATION WITH VARIABLE DAMPING
This section presents an example application of the Fuzzy
ACO algorithm to a continuous-state dynamic system. The
dynamic system under consideration is a simulated two-
dimensional (2D) navigation problem and similar to the one
described in [19]. Note that it is not our purpose to demon-
strate the superiority of Fuzzy ACO over any other method
for this specific problem. Rather we want to demonstrate the
functioning of the algorithm.
A. Problem Formulation
A vehicle, modeled as a point-mass of 1 kg, has to be
steered to the origin of a two-dimensional surface from any
given initial position in an optimal manner. The vehicle ex-
periences a damping that varies non-linearly  over the surface.
T
The state of the vehicle is defined as x = c1 v1 c2 v2 ,
with c1 , c2 and v1 , v2 the position and velocity in the direction
of each of the two principal  axes respectively.
T
The control
input to the system u = u1 u2 is a two-dimensional
force. The dynamics are:
   
0 1 0 0 0 0
0 −b(c1 , c2 ) 0 0  x + 1 0 u,
  
ẋ = 0 0 0 1  0 0
0 0 0 −b(c1 , c2 ) 0 1
where the damping b(c1 , c2 ) in the experiments is modeled
by an affine sum of two Gaussian functions, with means
(0, −2.3) and (4.7, 1) and standard deviations (2.5, 1.5) and
(1.5, 2) respectively. The damping profile can be seen in
Fig. 1(b), where darker shading means more damping.
B. Fuzzy ACO Setup and Parameters
The cores of the membership functions of the positions
c1 , c2 are chosen to be {−5, −3.5, −2, −0.5, 0, 0.5, 2, 3.5, 5}
and those for the velocities v1 , v2 are {−2, −0.5, 0, 0.5, 2}.
The action set contains of 25 actions, namely the cross-
product of the sets {−1, −0.5, 0, 0.5, 1} for both dimensions.
The local and global pheromone decay factors are respec-
tively γ = 0.01 and λ = 0.1. Furthermore, α = 3 and the
number of ants is 2000. The sampling time is Ts = 0.2 and the
ants are randomly initialized over the complete state space
at the start of each trial. An ant terminates its trial when its
position and velocity in both dimensions are within a bound
of ±0.25 and ±0.05 from the goal respectively.
C. Simulation Results
The convergence of the Fuzzy ACO algorithm is depicted
in Fig. 1(a). It shows that the relative variation of the policy
is already very low after about 20 trials. A slice of resulted
policy for zero velocity is depicted together with the damping
profile in Fig. 1(b). The policy shows the mapping of the
positions in both dimensions to the input on a fine grid.
Fig. 1(c) presents the trajectories of the vehicle for various
initial positions and zero initial velocity. It shows that the
vehicles manage to drive quickly to the goal, while avoiding
the regions of stronger damping to a certain extent. However,
the trajectories are only close to optimal. Especially for the
 1 5
0.9
0.8
0.7
Policy variation
0.6
c1 [m]
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0 −5
10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
Trial
(a) Convergence of the algorithm in terms of the (b) A slice of the resulting policy for zero
fraction of cores of the membership functions for velocity. It shows the control input for a fine
which the policy changed at the end of the trial. grid of positions. The damping profile is shown,
where darker shades mean more damping.
case where the vehicle starts in the bottom-left corner, the
optimality of the trajectory can be questioned as the vehicle
drives straight to the goal, without avoiding the region of
larger damping at all. These results demonstrate that the
algorithm is capable of converging quickly, but only to a
suboptimal policy with the settings used in the experiments.
VII. C ONCLUSIONS AND F UTURE W ORK
This paper has introduced the Fuzzy ACO algorithm for
optimal control problems, which combines the framework of
the AS and ACS algorithms with a fuzzy partitioning of the
state space. The applicability of this algorithm to optimal
control problems with continuous-valued states is outlined
and demonstrated on the non-linear control problem of two-
dimensional navigation with variable damping. The results
show convergence of the algorithm to a suboptimal policy
that drives the vehicle to the goal for any initial state. Future
research must further develop the algorithm to deal with
suboptimality in a better way and to theoretically prove its
convergence.
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